EU Reserves a Frequency For Talking Cars

Iddo Genuth writes "The European Commission has recently decided to reserve, across Europe, part of the radio spectrum for smart vehicle communications systems. The decision is part of the Commission's overall fight against road accidents and traffic jams, and the hope is that vehicles' developers will create wireless communication technology that will allow cars to 'talk' to other cars and to the road infrastructure providers."

Comments

KITT

[Daniel Weis]

But KITT always talked on the human audible range... Can you reserve that? Talk about road noise...

Too much computer stuff in cars..

[scsirob]

I can see my wife come home saying "Honey, the car has crashed..." And not a scratch on the paint..

And soon...

[PJCRP]

The RI/MPAA will be suing car providers for allowing illegal C2C movie sharing. :V

Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

I think it's only a matter of time before computer controled cars come in.
Problem is that even if they wait till they can build ones which are 10 times safer than human drivers and have far fewer accidents the first time one glitches and someone dies there will be the technophobes screaming about how you can't trust machines and that the killer cars need to be made illegal.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

There's just so much time wasted on the road.
Link all the cars and let a computer control them and the moment the light goes green all the cars could accelerate at once rather than the first car moving off, then the second, then the third etc. On top of that throw in smarter traffic lights, better public transport systems(since there would be no need for drivers the money could be spent on more busses/trains) and being able to sleep on your way into work and you have a big winner

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[dam.capsule.org]

Gives a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death?

In today's cars, the engines are already computer controlled: for example, the fuel injector, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_injector . That does not mean it run on Windows or any full fledged OS.

If a protocol is some day implemented, it will run on special hardware and be developed using the same kind of procedure used in airplane software. Well, one might hope...

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Narphorium]

The real problem, as I see it, would be how you transition from a system of millions of non-robot cars to a system where all the cars drive themselves.

I've always imagined that there should be something analogous to the carpool lane except that it would be for robot cars. A driver would be able to manually pull up beside the "robot lane" and request to join it. Then the other cars would automatically open up a spot and he would be automatically merged into the robot lane.

Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other you can ramp up the speed of the robot lane so that everyone gets to work much faster and they can even read the paper on the way there.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Link all the cars and let a computer control them and the moment the light goes green all the cars could accelerate at once...

I've heard in some countries drivers already do this?

In Chicago, the moment the light goes green, all the cars start honking their horns.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Renegade Lisp]

There used to be an ad here in Germany that showed a long row of cars, tightly packed after one another. Caption: "In principle, that's the right approach. Now everybody please go 240 km/h (150mph) at the same time."

It was an ad by the German railroad.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Martin Soto]

Don't worry. By the time this becomes a reality, simulators will be quite good. Indeed, you'll probably be able to drive in your simulator during commuting, while the computerized driving system in your car protects the rest of us from your mistakes.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[kailoran]

Are you suggesting we mount gun turrets on trains so they would be able to blast their way through stalled cars and suicidees? Should cut down on delays, that's for sure.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[swillden]

Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other

Also, the safe stopping distance between computer-controlled vehicles can be much, much shorter. Rather than relying on human reaction time to engage the brakes, which is at least a substantial fraction of a second in the BEST case, and well over a second in most cases, computers could coordinate velocity changes with sub-millisecond latencies. Each vehicle computer would have to know the capabilities of the vehicle, and some slack would probably be added for less than perfect road conditions, but stopping distances could be calibrated very precisely.

That, in turn, would mean that most of the time vehicles would be traveling close enough to draft off one another, which would make all but the lead vehicle substantially more fuel-efficient, even at much higher speeds. Some intelligent ordering based on vehicle size would help even more, though that would tend to place the largest (and generally most fuel-hungry) vehicles in the "trailbreaking" position where their fuel consumption would be high in order to improve the efficiency of the following vehicles.

I think your basic idea, a robot lane, is the most workable approach. Rather than trying to make cars smart enough to navigate safely when intermixed with manually-controlled vehicles, specific areas of the road would be designated for automatic controls. They'd still need to have some ability to detect manual vehicles in order to address situations where a manual vehicle improperly enters the automatic lane. Over time, as a greater percentage of vehicles acquire automatic control systems, a greater portion of the roads would be given to automatic control, until eventually major highways would be purely automatic.

Hopefully by that time, automation will have progressed enough that guidance can be added to smaller roads as well, safely handling a mixture of automatic and manual traffic. Over time, the manual traffic would probably dwindle to next to nothing anyway.

At some point, it's even likely that private ownership of vehicles would decline. Why own a car yourself if enough autonomous taxis are circling the streets, using smarter and smarter algorithms to make sure that there's always one nearby when you need it? Drivers are the largest expense of a taxi fleet, and eliminating them would make taxis very cost-competitive with private vehicle ownership. Or perhaps cooperative ownership would become the norm.

With fully automated roadways, I think bus and train traffic would decline. Fuel-efficient, automatically-convoying, publicly or cooperatively-owned cars would be cost-competitive with traditional public transport, with the flexibility and end-to-end delivery capability of automobiles. Automated cars would also eliminate parking problems. Even if your car was privately-owned, not a taxi, a public car or part of a co-op, the car could drop you off at your destination and then drive to a parking location, even if it happened to be some distance away. Or maybe your car could turn into a taxi that operates itself for your financial benefit while you're shopping. In any case, a few minutes before you're ready to leave, you'd call the car with your phone, and have it waiting for you when you emerge.

There are so many advantages to automated automobiles that it's an idea that absolutely will happen.

High speed wireless

[Iamthecheese]

Ad-hoc vehicle-to-vehicle connections that can be hacked without vehicles crashing and are: Fast, Prioritizable, ("my brakes are broken" is more important than "I would like to turn left in 50 meters") robust, standardizable, platform independant, extendable, and don't depend on a vehicle ID. What protocol is that?

Re:High speed wireless

[Nycran]

Or worse, we end up with the iCar. Every car will have the same numberplate "STEVE", and will only drive to places on Apple's white list.

Car viruses

[Nycran]

Just wait until we have car viruses. We could have cars that don't start, cars that seek out head-on collisions, and cars that start playing Rick Astley when you're out on a date.

Open the Garage Door,...

[unikussituation]

...HAL. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." ... not until you've cleaned up under the seat.

Where's my flying car?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I was promised a flying car!

Seriously, it's nice (and more than a little surprising) to see a government body do something so forward-thinking. We'll probably see fusion plants (in another 10-20 years ;-) before we see anything like fully robotic cars. Every year we talk here about the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that's just for a single vehicle, albeit off-road. Still, we're likely to see incremental uses of this kind of technology, particularly combined with GPS: tailgating prevention, traffic jam avoidance, gapers delay prevention (yay!), emergency vehicle path-clearing, etc. Kudos to the EU for reserving a chunk of the spectrum now, rather than later.

More information

[martimo]

One of the main european research projects behind this is CVIS: http://www.cvisproject.org/ . There is lots of documentation already...